Author: Satoru Hirose

 

Go for the perfect time.
最高のタイミングを勝ち取ろう。

 

My worst mistake in my life is not to start my own business much earlier.

When I was a kid, I had a dream of running my business. This dream became much bigger when my father failed in his business and gave up on his entrepreneurial endeavor. I thought I was going to make my business successful and save my family — but it was just a dream. I didn’t take any practical action for decades since then.

Years later, I got trapped into slavery of a high-paying job. But I still believed that the perfect time to start my business would come, and didn’t take action at all — even a small one. I finally noticed that the perfect time I had waited for didn’t exist, only after I lost my physical and mental health.

The perfect time will never come even if we desperately wait for; It’s something we create ourselves by taking small steps toward it. Or probably, it doesn’t even matter whether there is the perfect time for you or not; just start moving toward your destination. You still might worry that you would regret later that it was NOT the perfect time — but it won’t happen unless you give up on what you started.

Don’t wait for the perfect time. Even if you are still young, you’ll soon turn 30, 40, 50, or 60. Stand up, take action, and create it yourself. Never give up. Never live the rest of your life with regret.

 

 

Accept what you are now.
今の自分を受け入れよう。

 

I often couldn’t sleep at night. I still can’t sleep well occasionally. In fact, it just happens this morning.

In the past, anger was the primary reason. Anger at someone else, or something that was out of my control – It will never be the reason anymore though. I learned how to let go of my anger.

Right now, fear sometimes makes me awake at night. I never say that I can always overcome fear very well – Bacause I’m still learning it.

Maybe I’m not strong enough to deal with any kind of fear at any time. But I am strong enough to accept what I am right now, learn something new, and keep moving forward.

 

 

Don’t seek casual opinions.
漫然とした意見を求めない。

 

The person you ask for feedback is as equally important as the question you ask.

360-degree feedback is one of the common evaluation processes in a corporate world. From my point of view, it is also quite dysfunctional.

Some say, we can receive objective feedback about ourselves through 360-degree feedback. Not at all. People fill out a survey based upon their own opinion, and we receive the aggregate of subjective opinions of others. It can never be objective.

360-degree feedback also has the risk of asking for feedback from wrong people, even if its questions are right. Not everyone in a workplace — even a person who is sitting next to us — knows enough about what we do. Without enough facts in hand, how could it be possible to answer a survey without being affected by personal feelings or opinions?

Even worse, 360-degree feedback often asks wrong questions. Many companies use a template that outside people created (like HR agency), and some — if not all — questions don’t fit the culture of the company. It is a kind of comedy when we see questions like “Avoids negative politicking and hidden agendas” or “Serves others; avoids selfishness” on a 360-degree survey at the company that has a very hostile and bureaucratic corporate culture.

The same applies when we personally ask for feedback from others. To avoid receiving subjective opinions, we carefully need to choose whom we ask and what to ask. People who are close to us aren’t always capable of giving us the right feedback.

We need to avoid vague, out-of-context questions. For example, “From your point of view, what are my strengths?” may not always be the right question because people who don’t know you well can’t answer to this type of broad question. If we ask more specific question like “What kind of contributions did I make to your work in the past 6 months, and how did my contributions help you?” instead, we can get more useful feedback.

Getting sincere and useful feedback requires patience and careful thoughts. It is not something we can easily achieve on Facebook.

 

 

Choose the right person.
ふさわしい人を選ぼう。

 

When we ask someone to do something, there are only two ways of asking: as a laborer or a doctor.

When we look for a laborer, what we expect for the person is to do a certain thing instead of us doing it.

But when we look for a doctor, what we expect is completely different; we expect them to solve a problem that we can’t solve or we don’t know what to do with it.

Problem happens when we ask a laborer to do a doctor’s role, or when we ask a doctor to do a laborer’s role. The former is quite speculative and would not work most of the time — although the odds are slightly better than winning the jackpot, because there are some laborers who want to be a doctor someday. The latter happens quite often, but only causes a lot of frustrations on both side.

Even business leaders are not always good at distinguishing doctors from laborers. It requires careful observations of people, and it is the skill that no business school would teach us.